Growth in color management has resulted in an increase in software packages that are used to generate International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles. ICC profiles describe color attributes of a particular device or viewing requirement by defining a mapping between a source or target color space and a profile connection space (PCS), which is either CIELAB (L*a*b*) or CIEXYZ.
An ICC profile also plays an important role in ink consumption at a printer driver, or third party software, since the profile provides the means of determining CMYK intensities for each point in a given image. The minimization of ink usage at printers has been an important and challenging problem, which has had a significant economic impact. Current approaches to minimizing ink in ICC profiles are based on limiting a peak coverage or black removal heuristics. However, the ink saving efficiency of such mechanisms is quite limited.
Therefore, what is desired is an ICC profile mechanism that provides for efficient ink minimization.